


somewhere a clock is ticking

by ignitesthestars



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Romance, Slow Burn, Time Travel, set largely during Revenge of the Sith era
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-28
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-23 01:09:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13179153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignitesthestars/pseuds/ignitesthestars
Summary: Rey stretches.Her joints pop and at first it’s pleasant, like someone has worked the knots and tension of the past few months (years, lifetime) out of her body in a single motion. Except it doesn’t stop there, and she’s not stretching she’s beingpulled, like the Force has a hold of every square inch of her body and is dragging her in just as many directions.It’s nice and then it aches and then it hurts and Rey opens her mouth to scream, except she doesn’t have a mouth anymore, doesn’t have a body, is a streak of nothing rushing through the galaxy.Kill the past. Or rewrite it if you have to. [a reylo prequel era time travel fic]





	1. i've got this feeling that there's something that i missed

**Author's Note:**

> this is [nymja](http://archiveofourown.org/users/nymja)'s fault i take no responsibility at all

Rey stretches.

Her joints pop and at first it’s pleasant, like someone has worked the knots and tension of the past few months (years, lifetime) out of her body in a single motion. Except it doesn’t stop there, and she’s not stretching she’s being _pulled_ , like the Force has a hold of every square inch of her body and is dragging her in just as many directions.

It’s nice and then it aches and then it hurts and Rey opens her mouth to scream, except she doesn’t have a mouth anymore, doesn’t have a body, is a streak of nothing rushing through the galaxy. There is a cave on Ahch-To that has infinity versions of her stretching on into eternity and she slams through each one of them, unable to grab a hold of herself.

That’s when the hand shows up.

Rey knows this hand. Even when it’s gloved, maybe especially when it’s gloved. And she knows she shouldn’t trust it, knows it has betrayed her before, but all those other Reys are there on Ahch-To and scattered across the galaxy, each one of them alone, and she doesn’t want to be one of them.

“Don’t make me regret this,” she mutters at the hand, or she would if she had her mouth back. Her arm is gone as well, yet somehow she manages to reach across the emptiness of space, fingers not-there and trembling anyway.

Warm flesh closes around cool leather. Rey grew up climbing the ghosts of Star Destroyers; she might be shaking, but her grip is strong despite that. Desperation and relief lance through her awareness and then shudder through her body as the world whites out and she

exists again.

For a second, the only thing she can see is Ben Solo’s face. Rey’s seen a lot of expressions on this man’s face since he first took off his mask for her, but she doesn’t remember this: wide-eyed and white-lipped, nostrils flaring as he sucks in a lungful of air. His grip on her hand is tight enough to hurt, and as the rest of reality starts to colour itself in around them, she realises that both of his are holding her, like he’s terrified that just one won’t be enough.

It’s loud. They’re in some kind of hangar bay and she’s prone on her back with the Supreme Leader of the First Order bent over her like he’s suddenly found religion and Rey has no idea how she got here.

“What--” Her voice cracks. She swallows, tries again. “What did you do?”

He reels away like she’s burnt him. Some small, stretched part of her wants to yank him back, because she’s dizzy and she aches and that’s _a lot of droids staring at them right now_.

“You always expect the worst from me.”

“Are you really going to tell me this isn’t your fault?”

“Why don’t you explain to me what _this_ is before you start throwing around accusations.”

“Uuuuuuuuuuh,” intones one of the droids. “Requesting identification.”

“Do we need to request identification for intruders?” another droid inquires in a tone just as nasal as the first.

“Well, they didn’t exactly intrude so much as appear out of nowhere--” and that’s when the starfighters crash into the hangar.

Ben reacts without thought, which is probably the least surprising part of the last ten minutes. The _snap-hiss_ of his lightsaber igniting overwhelms the cacophony of screeching metal and Rey hasn’t been afraid of this man since she left him to die in the snow, but a frisson of terror shivers through her now anyway for reasons she couldn’t possibly put a name to right now.

Her fingers fumble at her waist for her own weapon.

It’s not there. A man launches himself too high out of the more mangled fighter, which should really be more of a distraction than it is. But the Supreme Leader of the First Order is standing over her with that stupid shuddering laser sword and she thinks for a moment that she is defenseless.

 _Don’t be absurd_. Her inner voice of practicality holds the unmistakable rasp of Leia Organa. _Are you a Jedi or aren’t you?_

To be fair, that’s a question she thinks is up for debate at the best of times. But it calms her down enough to parse the light in Ben’s eyes - they’ve fought before, but he hasn’t picked this moment to end things, is maybe horrified that she’s even entertained the thought.

“I wouldn’t attack you unarmed,” he hisses, ducking under blaster fire from the droids as a second man jumps from the more intact fighter and they are, abruptly, in the middle of a battle.

He holds out her hand to yank her up. As much as Rey wants to slap it away, the situation is sort of dire to be indulging her more immature urges right now. Her body still aches, limbs loose like they haven’t been socketed right, and she has to suck in a few gasps of oxygen as he hauls her upright.

“You’ll understand if I’m a _little wary_ ,” she snaps back; the droids are closing in on them now and she spares half a second to graze her eyes across Ben’s to make sure they’re on the same page before she reaches through the Force and _pulls_.

The droids squawk in surprised outrage, only to be cut off by the red glow of Ben’s weapon. They work in tandem, Rey targeting and Ben attacking. It’s like breathing, or maybe even easier. She can feel her own exhaustion dragging at her lungs, but this - this is effortless, the same way it was in Snoke’s throne room, the way she’d known it could be ever since the tips of their fingers brushed in a hut on Ahch-To.

“I’m not sorry,” he growls. They’re still holding hands.

“Did I ask for an apology?” Dimly, she’s aware of the two men fighting across the hangar with what have to be electro-staffs, because the possibility that they might be something else - well, it doesn’t exactly feel like a possibility.

Rey latches onto another droid, jerks it off its feet, throws it into Ben’s blade. Whether through happenstance or something more sinister, they’re working their way closer to their fellow fighters until, very suddenly, there is nothing left to kill.

Or at least, Rey fervently hopes that’s the case. Because those aren’t electro-staffs, they’re definitely lightsabers, and if she’d felt the absence of her weapon before, she’s _really_ missing it right now.

Without consultation, Ben positions himself between her and the older, closer man. Between the cloak and the close-cropped beard she thinks her heart might lurch into her throat with a quiet _Luke!_ chasing behind it, and the sudden stillness in Ben’s form tells her she’s not alone in the thought.

But the moment passes. There are obvious differences - shorter hair, a face with less lines, an expression of polite bewilderment when Rey is pretty sure that the concept of manners had become alien to Luke Skywalker. The older man’s gaze darts from Ben’s shuddering lightsaber to their conjoined hands to the protective way the idiot looms over her, and she has to resist the urge to shoulder him aside in favour of not startling either man into doing something stupid with their plasma weapons.

“Interesting,” the stranger remarks, his accent a smoother version of her own. 

That’s all the words anyone has time to say, because his companion - this man younger and wilder and strong enough in the Force to make Rey’s head spin - barrels across the room on the wings of the kind of fury that she’s only felt from one other person before.

She feels it in the split-second before it happens. A stirring in the Force, like a giant fist drawing back. Ben has that whole breath to look sneeringly dismissive at the effort before a wave of power slams him squarely in the chest.

“No!” The word rips from her throat at the same time his hand is torn from hers, his body flying across the hangar to slam into a durasteel wall.

“Anakin!” the older man barks, more chastising than concerned, but this man, this Anakin, ignores him entirely. 

The full weight of his presence in the Force bears down on Ben, who has dropped his lightsaber, who is pinned to the wall and snarling with the blackest kind of rage that Rey can only remember from that night on Starkiller Base.

“Where,” the Anakin man grinds out, “is the Chancellor?”

She knows that name, has heard it from Leia and other whispers amongst the remnants of the Resistance. Has picked it from the corners of Ben’s mind, and the first tickle of a possibility itches at her own thoughts, something too big and ridiculous to be real.

Sort of like the rest of her life lately.

“Anakin,” the older man repeats, sighing this time. Rey spots Ben’s lightsaber and twitches her fingers at the Force; it skitters across the floor until she can pick it up while the male egoes are distracted. “They were fighting _against_ the droids, not with them. At least give them the courtesy of being asked questions without--”

“I’m going to kill you,” Ben growls, and Rey sort of just squeezes her eyes shut on a groan.

The screech of tearing metal fills the hangar, and the durasteel wall he’s pinned against _splits down the middle_. Because this Anakin man might be unhappy about his lost Chancellor or whatever’s happened to get him so mad, but he’s no Kylo Ren.


	2. i could do most anything to you

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh man you guys thank you so much for your kind comments! the response has been genuinely overwhelming, i appreciate it so much <3

“Ben.”

Rey doesn’t yell. She doesn’t need to. Snoke might be dead and she might be confused, location wise, but the bond between her and the man once known as Kylo Ren has only grown stronger over the past few months.

Most days, that’s a frustration. Right now, she’s almost glad; across the scattered remains of droid parts, she sees his head whip over to her. There’s a shuddering tension in the empty space between all of them, the air gone hazy with the threat of power, and she thinks unbidden of a rock on a lonely planet, an old man guiding her through the Force.

 _It’s everything_. This isn’t the first time she’s felt it, but it’s definitely that much more spectacular.

“If you think I’m going to let him attack me without repercussions—”

“That man just called him Anakin.”

There are a lot of arguments that she could have thrown his way, but for all of Ben’s _kill the past_ -ing, she knows him well enough now to expect that the sound of his grandfather’s name will give him greater pause than a chastising ‘We don’t kill strangers on sight, even when they throw you against a wall’.

The tension in the air doesn’t relax. But it doesn’t pull tighter either, and Rey finds herself glancing at the older man, giving him a little _your turn_ gesture with the hand not holding Ben’s lightsaber. His eyebrows draw together, although whether that’s at the gesture or the fact that she now has the weapon, Rey can’t tell.

“You’ll _try_ ,” Anakin spits, stalking through droid parts towards Ben.

 _He can look after himself_ , the sensible part of her part of her brain reminds her. _You don’t know where you are or why you’re here with him. You’re_ supposed _to be on Dantooine._

Her limbs are not paying attention to the sensible part of her brain. She positions herself between Anakin and Ben - not igniting the lightsaber, but holding it ready.

“Get out of the way.”

That’s both of them at the same time. She rolls her eyes and gives a mute shake of her head.

“Anakin, be rational.” Apparently that’s the older man’s idea of how to calm a situation down, and Rey prepares to thumb the switch on her weapon because _in what universe is that helpful_. “You are letting emotions guide your hand. The Chancellor will not be found by this pointless posturing.”

Okay, that’s...better. Whoever this Chancellor is, Rey gets the impression that they must be important to Anakin, because it stops him in his tracks. The over-powered idiots in the hangar bristle at each other like offended sand-panthers, but the Force, which had felt so present before, abruptly floods free of the ship.

The whole thing couldn’t have taken more than ten minutes. With the threat of annihilation bleed from the atmosphere, Rey’s body abruptly remembers that she is Very Tired.

She sags. Ben rustles behind her like he’s going to hold her up or something, and that’s what forces some durasteel back into her spine. She refuses to be held up, especially by him. Especially by him when he seems so unaffected by whatever’s happened to them both.

“Are you working with the Separatists?” Anakin snaps finally. “And don’t lie. I’ll know.”

“The who?” Rey asks, at the same time that Ben bites out, “We owe you nothing.”

If he were closer, she’d elbow him. 

“I sense that this situation is even more complicated than it first appears,” the older man says diplomatically. “And we unfortunately are on a tight schedule at the present. I fear more droids will be upon us any moment, to say nothing of the integrity of this ship itself.”

“I’m Rey,” she offers, because if he’s on a tight schedule, he could probably stand to pontificate a little less. “This is Ben. We don’t know where we are or why we’re here, but we’re not working with anyone.”

That’s...technically a lie, and she can see the way both men furrow their brows at _not working with anyone_. By this stage Ben has moved up next to her, and if he’s remaining silent for now, that doesn’t mean she can’t feel his urge to reach out and snatch the lightsaber from her fingers.

Despite the situation, she has to bite back a smile. It’s always nice to have the upper hand in their game of laser sword toss. 

“We don’t have time for this, Obi-Wan,” Anakin mutters.

The name doesn’t really mean anything to Rey other than another on a list of lost Jedi, but she’s close enough to Ben to feel the way he goes absolutely still. His presence for the past few months has been like a vibrating bundle of heat in the back of her mind, but he’s ice cold now with something like—

It’s not fear. She’s felt him afraid before. If anything, she’d have to call it horror, the same horror she’d felt when she’d woken up strapped to a chair with a masked monster looming over her. 

Trapped. Immobile. Rey thinks that she probably shouldn’t grab his hand, that he has shown no signs of turning away from the Dark path she’d seen him on in the _Supremacy_ , but by the time she has the thought, her fingers are already wrapped around his wrist.

 _Traitor_ , her inner voice mutters. She grips his wrist tighter.

“We’ll come with you,” she blurts. 

Three heads turn to stare at her, all in varying shades of disbelief. 

“While we appreciate the offer of assistance,” Obi Wan says, again with the diplomacy, “it would not be prudent—”

“We don’t trust you.” That’s Anakin, and the fact that he reminds her of someone is not making her feel any better about that idea percolating away in her head, fed by Anakins and Obi Wans and the vague recollection of what the word Separatist meant in a galaxy before the Empire.

“I mean, that’s fair,” she allows. “But would you really rather just leave us here?”

The two men glance at each other. Apparently that’s enough for them to make a decision, because although Anakin is still glowering at the world in general, she gets the sense that he’s much less likely to lightsaber them in the face.

“I’ll take point,” he says. “Obi Wan, you bring up the rear. You two - in the middle, Rey first.”

“I’m not having _him_ at my back,” Ben snarls, and even the mild Obi Wan looks taken aback at the poison dripping from that pronoun.

Rey glares up at him. “Stop it. You aren’t helping.”

“I am not trying to _help_.”

“Yes, i suppose that would need too much forward thinking for you to bother with.” She jabs him in the chest. “If you’ve got a better idea, let’s hear it! Or did you just throw us into this situation without any kind of plan at all?”

Ben opens his mouth to retort, but the unmistakable sound of a lightsaber re-igniting interrupts him.

“We are going now,” Anakin grits out. “The life of the Chancellor and the fate of the Republic is at stake.”

There are a lot of things that Rey could say to that, and about twice as many questions it prompts. Right at the top of the list, uncomfortable and impossible is _what year is it, exactly?_

It’s a crazy idea. Not so long ago, Rey would have said impossible but - well, she can lift rocks with her mind these days, so ‘impossible’ has sort of been tossed out the airlock. Leia Organa survived in space with only her fancy robes and the Force to protect her. Why couldn’t she have travelled to the past?

No, the more pressing question has less to do with _what_ , and more to do with _why_. About the only thing in the galaxy she trusts Ben Solo not to do right now is cut her down from behind. She can still remember his hand stretched out towards her, practically begging her to join him. The thought kind of creates a throbbing headache in the side of her temple, but she’s pretty sure even her rejection of him then hasn’t made him want to stab her in the back.

Front, maybe. But she has enough faith in her own skills to believe she’ll see it coming.

Ben is still bristling with the urge to reject the whole situation though - rich, from a man she’s confident caused it - and chances are high that pleading won’t work (chances are also high that her dignity won’t allow it). So Rey sets one hand on the side of her hip and raises her eyebrows up at him.

“Are you telling me that you’re threatened by one lone Jedi at your back?”

He knows he’s being goaded. She can see it in the way his face twitches, and boy, did he ever need that mask. But through a combination of factors and one minor miracle, he finally relents, gesturing for her to proceed ahead of him.

“Finally,” Anakin mutters from up ahead.

For the first time since this whole mess started, Rey thinks she can agree with him.


	3. don't you breathe, don't you breathe

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> iiiiiii am skimming over some stuff for brevity's sake and also stealing some style elements from Matthew Stover (author of the Revenge of the Sith novelisation) to spice things up a bit.
> 
> ALSO i should mention that u can find me @ ignitesthestars on both tumblr and twitter. i don't do much on twitter admittedly, but tumblr is where i post the majority of my writing and answer asks and stuff <3 
> 
> as always, thank you for the wonderful response to this fic!

Seeing R2 is what makes the whole thing feel abruptly real.

Not that Rey thought she was dreaming before, but there had been a certain sense of disbelief to the whole experience sitting in her chest that shrivels up and dies when she realises the astromech is there.

“Artoo?” she blurts, because - well, he should recognise her if she’s wrong about what’s happened here.

His dome swivels curiously towards her. _How do you know what I am called by, human?_ It’s the same slightly rude tone she’s used to from her time on the _Falcon_ , but there’s not recognition in the beeps of Binary it’s throwing at her.

“...How do you know my astromech?” Anakin asks, directing the droid to slice into the ship’s systems. He seems calmer now they’re moving, doing something, and it takes some self restraint not to glance back at Ben.

“D’you really want me to spend the time answering that right now?” Rey says, in lieu of picking apart what _my astromech_ means. The goal right now is to come out of this alive (and the ship is rocking with such force that she’s not sure how possible that is). 

It occurs to her as they locate the Chancellor’s beacon that there had probably been ships in that hangar. She’s a fair pilot, and she’s heard that Ben could probably go toe to toe with Poe Dameron, and yet the thought of bailing had never occurred to her. She supposes you could call it the Force (she suspects you can actually call it curiosity).

Anakin makes a sound that might be amusement or might be derision. Rey can feel Ben vibrating with barely restrained frustration behind her, and wonders what he must feel like to the other two.

...Wonders what she must feel like, after a beat or two. She’s a Jedi, after all, or at least what passes for one in the place she woke up in that morning.

“No, Artoo, you have to stay here. Listen, someone has to maintain computer contact; do you see a datajack on me anywhere?”

Artoo whistles acquiescence with such fondness that it sort of hurts that he doesn’t recognise her. 

“Honestly, the way you talk to that thing.”

“He’s not a thing,” Rey snaps at Obi Wan as they crowd into a turbolift, prompts a raised eyebrow from both Jedi.

“Huh,” Anakin says. He clenches his hand idly when he does it, and that’s when she notices that it’s made of durasteel.

Like Luke’s. Stars, she hope Ben hasn’t clocked that yet. It’s anyone’s guess as to what might set him off again, and there’s simply no _room_ to deal with that sort of situation in what is essentially a very fast elevator.

“You know what, maybe you aren’t so bad.” Anakin sounds almost kind. He gives his mechanical hand a little shake, glancing over at his partner. “Master, I’m starting to get the feeling that it’s not General Grievous who’s the mastermind behind this plan.”

Obi Wan’s other eyebrow goes up, and the two of them have another one of those silent communications. Rey wonders if they’re actually speaking mind to mind somehow, or if they just know each other that well. It sort of reminds her of what it’s like with Finn.

(It sort of reminds her of what it was like in Snoke’s throne room).

“Ah, well,” Obi Wan sighs. “It wouldn’t be a proper rescue if it wasn’t also a trap. I’d ask if you two were involved--” this directed at Rey and Ben, “but I sense that subtlety is not the forte of either one of you.”

“You somersaulted into this ship out of a wrecked starfighter,” Ben says flatly, and that’s when the turbolift judders to a stop. The doors do not open. “And this is a farce, not a rescue. I pity your Chancellor, if the two of you are all he has to come for him. ” 

“Yeah?” Anakin pulls his lightsaber out, squinting at the ceiling. “You’d be the only one, kid.”

Ben’s face whitens with rage in a way that makes Rey _very_ glad she’s kept his weapon. She stamps on his foot as Anakin cuts a hole in the ceiling, rolling her eyes as the fury intended for the Jedi transforms into something more like irritation when it’s directed at her.

“We shouldn’t be here,” he hisses.

“Oh, you’re gonna tell me that? You know where I was this morning, Ben? Because it definitely wasn’t _on a ship that’s falling apart with two d--_ ”

With two dead men. She only barely manages to cut herself off, and while it looks like Anakin misses it entirely as he clambers outside the turbolift, Obi Wan’s shape blue gaze doesn’t seem to miss anything.

“When this is over,” he says, “I think I’d quite like to get to know the two of you.”

-

This is Rey:

A scavenger, an orphan. A nothing that nobody wanted.

A pilot, a Jedi, a friend. A beacon in the Force.

The other three can feel it. Anakin, wrapped in his own worries, barely gives it a second glance. The durasteel of his mechanical hand burns with the Dark Side, and far more unsettling is the familiarity of the girl’s companion. If only because he can’t put a finger (flesh or metal) on what he reminds him of.

So he resolves to ignore them both for the time being. Unless they happen to get in his way.

Obi Wan knows that something is amiss, simply because she _isn’t_ amiss. She is a presence in the force that should have been there all along, but has only now decided to appear. He feels her mowing down droids as they finally escape the turbolift and force their way through what remains of the _Invisible Hand_ , and it’s like meeting Anakin for the first time. Before his friend was touched by war and loss, the slow and quiet hardening that comes with being responsible for so many lives, and so many lives lost.

But she fights with a red blade of a kind he’s never seen before and the boy at her back looms over her like a gathering storm, raining destruction on anything that dare approach her.

(And there is a familiarity there for Obi Wan as well. A discomforting sense that he is looking at some kind of future).

Whoever they are, they certainly aren’t Jedi.

As for Ben--

(and he has become Ben when he is around her, even in his own mind, something that terrifies him more than any Supreme Leader ought to be terrified).

As for Ben, this is Rey.

And he is learning just how far he will follow her.


End file.
